She padded up to Owen, pressing a firm hand on his shoulder. She growled. Flecks of red gristle clung to the spaces between her flawless white teeth.
"Don't try to think too hard. Now, we have a lot of work to do. The fun is just beginning."
With catlike grace, Dr. Judith White prowled out the office door.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo and it wasn't that he didn't want to squash a few more cockroaches. His only problem was the wrong man was asking him to do the squashing.
"Let me talk to Smith," Remo said.
"Dr. Smith isn't here," Mark Howard explained. Howard was assistant director of CURE, the supersecret organization for which Remo worked as enforcement arm. That is, on those days Remo was actually working. At the moment, as Remo stood on the sidewalk in Little Rock cradling the pay phone between ear and shoulder, it wasn't one of those days. "No offense, Junior," Remo said to Howard, "but I don't scrunch cockroaches for you. Put Daddy on the phone."
A few students from nearby Philander Smith College strolled down the sidewalk chatting loudly. Like most college students of the past forty years, these seemed to have an abundance of loud opinions and a lack of actual textbooks. Remo watched them as they walked through the historic Quapaw Quarter of the city's downtown.
On the phone there came an exasperated exhale.
"Remo, you know Dr. Smith leaves the office at five on Tuesdays and Thursdays now," Mark Howard replied, his youthful voice straining to be patient. "He said you can talk to me."
"Talk to, yes. Take orders from, no. You want to talk about the weather?"
"No."
"See you in the funny papers." Remo hung up the phone.
The receiver rang the instant he broke the connection. Remo had to hand it to Mark Howard; the young man was quick on the ol' keyboard. He picked up the phone.
"Joe's Porn Palace. You can't spell coitus without us."
Howard's voice was growing irked. "Remo, please."
"Sorry," Remo said sweetly. "Still not the right guy for me." He hung up once more.
This time the pay phone fell silent.
While he waited, Remo whiled away the minutes counting the birds that flew overhead. He was up to thirty-one when the phone finally rang again. He scooped up the receiver.
"Hi, Smitty," he announced.
The lemony voice on the other end of the line was not that of Mark Howard. Where Howard's voice was young, this voice was older, more tired and infinitely more irritated.
"What is the problem?" announced Dr. Harold W. Smith, the director of CURE.
"No problem," Remo said. "Except that I don't take orders from your helper monkey. Why are you whispering?"
"I am in my bedroom on my briefcase phone. My wife is downstairs and I don't want her to overhear. What's wrong? Mark says you are having trouble with the assignment."
"No trouble. I don't even know what it is. You know the rule, Smitty. I'm Sinanju. Sinanju gets hired by an emperor. You're my emperor. I work for you."
He could almost see Smith wincing on the other end of the line. "Please don't you start calling me that, too."
Remo was the Reigning Master of Sinanju, the original martial art. Born in blood on the rocky shores of North Korea, Sinanju was the sun source of all the other, lesser martial arts. For millennia the Masters of Sinanju had rented their services as assassins to rulers throughout the world. Remo's teacher, who had been Reigning Master until Remo's ascension to that position a few months before, had refused to admit to working for anything less than a true tyrant king, and so had long before dubbed Harold W. Smith "emperor." It was an honorific Smith didn't embrace. And it was definitely something he didn't wish to see carried through into Remo's fledgling Masterhood.
"Whatever you call it, you're the boss," Remo said. "Tradition says I can't start taking orders from the kid. And I happen to agree with tradition here. What if Smitty Junior goes nuts and starts giving me whacko assignments, like maybe I should make him President or pope or something? Or he tells me to start assassinating petunias 'cause they give him the sniffles? Or what if he orders me to kill you?"
"At the moment I would consider that a blessing," Smith said tightly.
"You're not out of it that easy, Smitty," Remo grumbled. "If I'm stuck with Howard, you are, too."
"Yes," Smith said dryly. "Just so you know, Remo, I do not consider myself stuck at all. Mark has helped lighten my load considerably. Two nights a week now I am able to have dinner with my wife. And might I remind you, Mark has also saved both our lives."
Remo's face darkened at the memory. There had been a terrible battle back in the village of Sinanju. On that dark day months before, it was Mark Howard's timely intervention that had provided insight that might have turned the tide.
"Maybe," Remo admitted. "The jury's still out on what would have happened back then if he'd butted out." He frowned with a sudden thought. "What do you mean both? You weren't in the line of fire back then."
Smith cleared his throat. "Er, yes. Can we get on with this? My wife nearly has dinner ready."
"Fine. Sue me for wanting to hear your dulcet tones," Remo said. He drummed his fingertips on the steel phone-book tray. "What's the deal? More cockroaches, right?"
As Smith quickly sketched out the details of that night's assignment, Remo's fingers continued to drum a hollow staccato on the pay phone's metal tray.
After a few moments, Smith stopped suddenly. Bored, Remo was back to counting birds.
"What is that noise?" the CURE director asked abruptly.
"What noise?" Remo asked.
"I don't know. It sounds like a jackhammer." Remo glanced around. He didn't see any jackhammer. In fact, he saw no road construction whatsoever. He did see a few more college students. They were staring at him as they walked past. More accurately, they were staring at his hand.
Remo glanced down.
Four deep hollows in the shape of drumming fingers pitted the otherwise smooth surface of the stainless-steel phone-book tray. It looked as if the metal had superheated and melted into four neat pockets.
"It stopped," Smith said over the phone.
"Yeah," Remo grunted, stuffing his hand in his pocket. "Can we just finish this up?"
Smith seemed to sense something was wrong. "Were you even listening?"
"Sort of listening, mostly bored." He sighed. "Sorry, Smitty. I've got a lot of stuff on my mind lately."
It was true. He had been preparing nearly all of his adult life to take over as Reigning Master of Sinanju. He thought it would be a snap once he finally accepted the position. He had come to find out that there was no way to be completely ready for so awesome a responsibility. All the training in the world had not prepared him for the new reality of his life. Once he actually became Reigning Master, it just felt different than he had expected.
Remo was surprised by the CURE director's sympathetic tone.
"I understand," Smith said. "Even when one knows it is coming, it still takes time to come to grips psychologically with the burden of great responsibility. There has been some research into the subject. If it would be helpful, I could send some published papers on the topic."